3 May, 2001: The Eternal Footman
It may seem odd that a book about a literal plague of demons -- demons of melacholy, no less -- decimating the population of the western world could be life-affirming, but that's the word I would use to describe James Morrow's The Eternal Footman. It's a sequel to Towing Jehovah, in which the two-mile-long corpse of God plummets into the sea and is, at angelic request, towed to Its presumptive final resting place in the Arctic Circle, and Blameless in Abaddon, in which a grief-maddened Pennsylvania judge puts His not-yet-brain-dead body on trial for crimes against humanity. They're little seriocomic masterpieces. Jehovah was about humanity's relation to God; Abaddon was about the nature of evil and how people reconcile themselves to the fact that bad things happen. Footman completes the trilogy neatly; Footman is about death.